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Innovative Companies Highlight AI Advancements at AWS Re: Invent 2018

Last week, Amazon hosted its popular and growing AWS Re: Invent event focused on all things around the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. In addition to the many announcements featured in last week’s articlehighlighting Amazon’s many AI and machine learning-related announcements, many of the hundreds of partner vendor and consulting companies that were there had similar innovative announcements. In this article, we highlight a handful of companies that are doing some truly innovative and interesting things around AI in the cloud.

At AWS Re:Invent 2018, established AWS consulting and managed services firm Cascadeo launched its AI-powered AIOps Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) managed service platform. Using a combination of predictive analytics, automated deployment and machine learning, combined with the AWS serverless technology platform, the system can automate a significant part of the customer onboarding process and managed service provider (MSP) offerings. By using automation instead of human power, the company can offer managed services for just hundreds of dollars a month, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars that such services usually cost.

Cloudinary has long been known to handle a wide range of media management issues for organizations, including scaling, translating and transforming images, video and other rich media assets. The company recently announced AI-based capabilities that add additional power including auto tagging, asset color analysis, face detection, celebrity detection, OCR character recognition, gaze detection, background removal and other features that leverage the power of machine learning and computer vision.

At AWS Re:Invent 2018, Cylance demonstrated their AI-powered cybersecurity system that uses machine learning to deliver predictive security products for prevention, detection and response of emerging cybersecurity threats and uses specialized security services to enhance the security of technology assets. Cylance uses artificial intelligence to enable more agile response to malware threats, application and script control, memory protection, device policy enforcement, root cause analysis and threat hunting. This allows the system to combat sophisticated malware, ransomware, malicious scripts, weaponized documents and other emerging threats without having to be hard coded to recognize those threats in advance. At this year’s AWS re:Invent Cylance announced the availability of CylancePROTECT, the company’s endpoint threat prevention solution that uses AI to identify and block malware execution, whether known or unknown, in real-time, without signatures or referencing repositories of known malware.

Peak.ai unveiled a unique AI “Platform-as-a-Service” that aims to be the “SAP for the AI Era.” The Peak AI System combines AI infrastructure, data models, applications and solutions to bring a comprehensive, AI-centric solution to organizations who want benefits such as personalization, enhancing revenue growth and demand forecasting and optimization without having to figure out how to put all the pieces together. The system combines data ingestion, data model unification and creation, an AI library with out-of-the-box algorithms and applications, orchestration for complex workflows and an API for embedding with existing applications.

A long-time AWS (and Microsoft) partner, Redapt has focused on using Machine Learning and AI to find new ways for companies to look at their data and make their findings more valuable. The organization re-architected their data-centric framework to utilize AWS’ deep learning tools, including SageMaker. Their new application teaches itself how the business operates and organizational flow and becomes interatively more intuitive with use.

Announced just two weeks before Re:Invent 2018, ThoughtSpot launched their SearchIQ voice driven analytics platform that provides a voice interface for interaction with enterprise analytics and provide answers to data questions. The solution leverages the AI of the company’s SpotIQ offering, which the company built from scratch. The solution uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically put together relevant data sets from across the enterprise, leveraging on premise, private clouds or public cloud data. The SpotIQ platform is built on ThoughtSpot’s relational search platform, and provides answers to questions users care about. Machine learning algorithms detect data anomalies, trends and insights based on past behavior, as well as the behavior of other similar users.

Uptake provides industrial AI and Internet of Things (IoT) software. Using data science and machine learning, the company can turn raw data into valuable outcomes for industrial companies. The company’s solution combines data analytics and machine learning with their proprietary industry knowledge to give companies in the industrial sector more value from their technology investments. At AWS Re:Invent 2018, the company demonstrated their machine learning-based solutions and ways in which IoT devices can participate in valuable AI-based workflows.

With thousands of companies in attendance at AWS Re:Invent 2018, there is not doubt a significant number of additional AI and machine learning-based technologies announced or pending soon. The exponential pace of product development continues to grow, leveraging cloud-based AI technology.

Ronald Schmelzer, columnist, is senior analyst and founder of the Artificial Intelligence-focused analyst and advisory firm Cognilytica, and is also the host of the AI Today podcast, SXSW Innovation Awards Judge, founder and operator of TechBreakfast demo format events, and an expert in AI, Machine Learning, Enterprise Architecture, venture capital, startup and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and more. Prior to founding Cognilytica, Ron founded and ran ZapThink, an industry analyst firm focused on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Computing, Web Services, XML, & Enterprise Architecture, which was acquired by Dovel Technologies in August 2011.